Redemption of the Runningman

Was it the greatest hoax in running history? Or did Robert Garside, on his third attempt, really run around the world?

By
Dan Koeppel

Jun 20, 2018

THE SUN SETS ON THE MOST DISTANT HORIZON I’VE EVER SEEN, dropping away from what had seemed—all day—like a flat and featureless earth. One week ago, this dusty plain contained nothing but promise: of triumph, adventure, even justice. If those things were ever real, they’ve burned away in the desert heat, along with the soles of my feet—scorched through my shoes by searing asphalt—and my lips, so singed and scabbed that pressing them to a water bottle makes me wince in pain. I’ve got nothing left. I can’t go on. But I have to. Even if my mind and body want to stop, I won’t. This is the run I’ve spent a decade waiting to do, and the wait has been more tortuous than the run. I need to finish it, no matter what.

Australia’s Nullarbor Plain is traversed by a stretch of road—the only road, 1,663 miles long—between the southern cities of Adelaide and Perth. The plain is bordered on the south by more than a hundred miles of cliffs that tower above the Southern Ocean. North, there’s cracked and crusted desert—the Down Under equivalent of America’s Death Valley. Nullarbor means “no trees,” but the region’s dryness and distances also mean nearly no people. Physically, the Nullarbor is almost twice as big as the state of Florida; but the vast region is so sparsely inhabited that no official population records are kept.

However, the two-lane Eyre (pronounced “Air”) Highway is busy. Traversing the plain is the iconic Aussie road trip. Camper vans and cars pulling trailers dart between massive, triple-loader trucks known in this part of the world as road trains. Vehicle travelers are supported by a series of “roadhouses,” spaced anywhere from 45 to 125 miles apart, which offer gas, car repair, food, and dormitory-style accommodations. (Running a roadhouse is lonely but rewarding; the gas station at Penong is said to possess the most profitable petrol pumps in the world, and the mechanic’s shop at Nundroo is Australia’s most lucrative.) Completing the drive earns the traveler an “I Crossed the Nullarbor” bumper sticker, emblazoned with images of wombats and camels (the latter now feral after being introduced to the region in the 19th century).

Those vehicles speed by me in air-conditioned bliss. Their gusting wakes are welcome, suctioning away flies and the persistent odor of road-kill kangaroo. My goal is to run the heart of the Nullarbor—the loneliest, driest, emptiest 200 miles at the plain’s center. I’ve got two weeks.

One might think that to cross a place so formidable under one’s own power would lead to acclaim, but history shows it is just as likely that you’ll be ridiculed, or disbelieved, or worse. Edward John Eyre made the first east-west traverse in 1841; his partner, John Baxter, perished en route. Arthur Mason survived his 1896 journey only by eating his pet dog. That same decade, Henri Gilbert faced dehydration and injuries to his feet, according to his diaries. The truth is hard to tell, because at some point following his apparent arrival at the plain’s eastern terminus, Gilbert vanished, never completing the planned global circumnavigation he’d begun several years earlier (and thus never collecting the reward—equal to about half a million current U.S. dollars—he’d been promised by wealthy backers for doing so).

I was following in a more modern—but equally infamous—set of footsteps. A century after Gilbert, a British runner named Robert Garside also attempted to circle the globe on foot. But Garside disappeared, too; not physically—he returned to his starting point unharmed—but via an angry incredulity that led him to be seen not as a trailblazer but as a fraud. I was here because I’d doubted Garside, and in my journalistic expression of that had helped instigate a media lynch mob that contributed to the destruction of his reputation. And of all the places Garside ran, those who didn’t find him credible argued, the Nullarbor—the impossible, wasted, torrid Nullarbor—was where some of Garside’s biggest lies played out.

But Robert Garside did run the Nullarbor. At least that’s what I’d come to believe after an encounter with the runner in London a year after he finished his journey. And I realized that in the attacks I’d joined, one of the most incredible things a runner had ever done—run around the world—was wiped out. Almost eight years on foot erased because I and other journalists had been too willing to believe somebody else’s definition of what a real runner is, and decided that Robert Garside couldn’t possibly be one.

So now, I want to make amends. I want to prove that running this place is possible. And when I do, I hope the remorse that has haunted me for almost a decade will burn away. I wasn’t running alone. My friend Morgan Beeby had joined me. We’d trained for months in Los Angeles, developing a strategy to address the lack of water, the great heat, the vast distances. But our confidence had been shaken from the moment we’d arrived in Australia. In Sydney, we’d heard ominous talk of murdered vagabonds. We were warned, repeatedly, to bring a satellite phone (we didn’t). In Ceduna, at the plain’s eastern edge, we stayed in a reeking-of-cigarettes house trailer, the owner of which, after hearing our plan and collecting $10 rent, instantly pegged me: “You,” he said, without a single hint from us, “must have something to atone for.”

How the feature appeared in the August 2012 issue.

Runner's World

ROBERT GEORGE GARSIDE WAS BORN ON JANUARY 6, 1967, in Stockport, England, a suburb of Manchester, part of an industrial region that sprawls along the banks of the Mersey River. He grew up playing many sports—a self-described “all-rounder”—but especially loved soccer and was captain of his school team. Garside’s parents divorced when he was a teenager, and his mother returned to her native Slovakia. He says he developed a need to travel almost as a way to follow his own mother, who—in exiting a difficult relationship with the runner’s father—had finally found a sense of contentment. “I remember the day she left,” Garside says. “She was so happy, leaving all that stuff behind.” The joy and freedom of that escape, Garside says, is what gave birth to his own inner wanderlust. “[I wanted to see] the world because it’s a way of understanding things,” he says. But accomplishing that goal seemed elusive; instead, Garside says, he was haunted by a “sense of aimlessness.”

As a child, he says, he ran and played in the woods near his house, in “a huge forest stretching for miles. I had some of my best times there when I was a kid.” Beginning to run as a young adult, he says, brought him back to that state. “You have a good experience as a kid,” he says, “and it affects the rest of your life.” Despite this, Garside felt that his future was uncertain. He was at “a crossroads,” he says, and looking for a “way forward.” In 1993, at that point a psychology student at the University of London’s Royal Holloway college (and a volunteer with the City of London police), he found it. Garside was thumbing through a copy of The Guinness Book of Records (during a “rare visit to the library,” he jokes) and came across the story of Dave Kunst, an American who—from 1970 through 1974—walked around the world. Garside wondered if anyone had ever tried it at a runner’s pace. He contacted Guinness, which informed him that no such record existed. “That’s when I knew what I was going to be,” he says. Garside quit school and began training. He planned a route and lined up sponsors, dubbing himself “The Runningman.”

In December 1995, Garside boarded a plane to South Africa. From Cape Town, he started running north, to Namibia. His plan was to curve up the western coast of Africa, fly north to Spain, and turn east at the Mediterranean. But the run sputtered out at around 1,000 miles. Garside says he was unprepared for the difficulties of the actual journey, especially the complications it created with his girlfriend, Joanna, whom he left behind in London. In March 1996, he returned home.

GOING THE LONG WAY Robert Garside set out from New Delhi’s India Gate on October 20, 1997, determined to traverse every continent the longest way possible. Almost six years later, on June 13, 2003, Garside finished back in New Delhi, having nearly accomplished his goal while shattering the Guinness criteria. The global records authority required that he start and finish in the same location; travel a distance greater than the length of the Tropic of Capricorn (nearly 23,000 miles); cross every line of longitude and the Equator at least once; and cover Europe, Asia, South America, North America, and Australia. Garside ran approximately 40,000 miles through 29 countries and six continents, including a voluntary—and arduous—Africa run. “You could run around the world in a year and a half,” Garside says. “But it’s not something you want to rush. You want to go the long way. You want to see stuff. This is the world.… Breaking the record becomes less important.”

Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook

OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, GARSIDE PLANNED A NEW ROUTE that would take him from London, east through Europe—he could better stay in touch with Joanna, he says—and then into Russia. He’d veer south and work his way across Asia, then traverse Australia and the Americas lengthwise before returning to Europe. Garside departed London on December 7, 1996. This time, there was fanfare, media coverage, and a Greenpeace sponsorship. “It felt good,” he says, “to be a star.”

The runner’s next decisions—more than anything else he’d do—would lead to the staining of his record, which would in turn foment outrage in the media and the running world. That outrage would peak over three years later as Garside, behind schedule and running a greatly modified route, crossed the U.S.

UP THE AMERICAS Garside in Caracas, Venezuela, in April 2000.

AP Photo/Andres Leighton

Garside posted his proposed trajectory online, and was making entries in a web diary as often as he could (it was the early days of the Internet, and access was spotty). He arrived in Slovakia, where he was reunited with his mother, in January. But there Garside stalled, again preoccupied with his crumbling relationship back in London. He says he’d planned for the break to be brief—Guinness allowed pauses of up to 30 days for injury or moving from one land mass to another—but as the weeks wore on, the runner began to falsify his diaries. In early September 1997, Garside’s online diaries offered a harrowing but fictional account of an attack in Pakistan: “I was robbed,” he wrote, “my tent slashed with a knife.” Garside says his biggest fear—driven by near-constant media coverage of his adventures—was that somebody else would set out and beat him by taking a more direct route (the Kunst record of 14,452 miles bypassed Africa and South America). Garside wanted to traverse every continent. “I wanted to see the world,” he says, by going “the long way, not the short way. But I didn’t want other people to beat me. If they knew I was having trouble, everything could go down the drain.”

To himself, though, Garside had to admit that this run, like the first, had failed: He’d already stopped longer than Guinness would permit. But by the fall of 1997, Garside was ready to start a third attempt. The relationship with Joanna had ended, and it was a relief to Garside. “She wanted me to get on with my life,” he says. By then, however, the run was Garside’s life. His third version of the quest would be done with less fanfare and limited sponsorship; his plan was to start in New Delhi, India, and find local support wherever he could, keeping the effort low-key. This strategy meant less pressure on him. But there was one ticking bomb: the online diaries of his second attempt, which Garside had not taken down. The runner’s made-up tales of danger and deprivation in the Hindu Kush would be repeated in most media accounts of his journey; each repetition would cement the accounts as central to the run’s narrative.

There would be genuine danger and adventure ahead. But on October 20, 1997, as he left New Delhi, running toward China, Robert Garside had no idea that the biggest threat to his run would be borne of his own past actions.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO RUN AROUND THE WORLD? Give the idea a moment’s thought, and you’ll soon conclude that it is unimaginable, perhaps impossible. The task shares little with ultramarathoning, or even a record attempt across a great—but defined—distance or time span. One term proposed for open-ended efforts like Garside’s is “journey run,” and that’s a good start. In such an effort, speed is unimportant; instead, there’s a sort of strategic arcana. How does one define “around the world?” The criteria are a subject of debate among organizations that certify circumnavigations. Do you need to cross each continent? Is there a minimum mileage that should be required? Garside’s conditions, supplied by Guinness, mandated that he travel a total distance that exceeded the length of the Tropic of Capricorn—almost 23,000 miles—cross the equator at least once, and start and finish at the same place. The record-keeping organization also set, in advance, the standards of evidence Garside would have to meet. Logbooks with official witness statements were to be the primary means of documentation, along with photographs and video—and, in a nod to the senselessness inherent in any such effort (as well as difficulty defining exactly what “running” is), Guinness noted that “the strategy employed in covering the distance is up to the participant…there are no minimum running distances each day.”

The structural challenges involved in completing—and proving—a journey run were what initially attracted the person who would become Garside’s primary nemesis, a Canadian distance-running enthusiast named David Blaikie. During the time of Garside’s efforts, Blaikie wielded huge influence via his now-defunct website, Ultramarathonworld.com. At first, Blaikie viewed Garside with a sort of removed skepticism. But over time, Blaikie came to believe the runner was a fraud. He became a primary source for journalists (including me) writing about Garside. Blaikie’s reporting was obsessive and meticulous; page after page dissected every element of Garside’s effort, including the runner’s route; his media claims; his qualifications; his physical and emotional state; even his social life. Between 1998 and 2000, Blaikie’s doubts shifted toward certainty: Garside was a fake. Ultramarathonworld.com’s coverage of the runner often resembled a prosecution, and one of Blaikie’s key exhibits was the Nullarbor. Garside had arrived in Perth, Australia, on August 13, 1998—he’d traveled from India through China to Japan over the previous eight months—and set out from the Nullarbor’s westernmost roadhouse, at Balladonia, on September 14. Less than four weeks later, Garside claimed, he arrived at Ceduna.

Blaikie believed none of this. In an article titled “Analysis of Run Across Australia—Very Long and Carefully Documented,” Blaikie implied that nobody could accomplish a solo foot-crossing of the desert expanse: “Where did he get the 12 litres of water a day he says he required in hot conditions? Roadhouses along the Nullarbor are up to 190 km apart, and there are no rivers, lakes, streams, or puddles to drink from.”

Good question, if you haven’t crossed the Nullarbor, if you’re reading about it or forming a thesis based on maps that depict nothing but barrenness. From an armchair, it is absolutely impossible to run the Nullarbor. Once you’re out there, however, there is a way. Robert Garside discovered it. So would I.

GARSIDE DIDN’T DETAIL HIS “METHOD” FOR RUNNING the Nullarbor as he crossed the plain. Instead, his online diaries were filled with anecdotes and snapshots; he was having fun, literally hitting his stride. He was getting what he wanted out of running: “I like to be out in the wilderness—that’s more in keeping with who I am.” But there were also the social interactions. “I like the world,” he says. “[I like] the people.” Garside had found a girlfriend in Australia—a young medical student named Lucy McKinnon—and was getting ready for what he believed was the most important leg of his journey: the Americas. Garside’s plan was to fly from Sydney, Australia, to Chile, and run north, all the way to the U.S. The runner’s planned route from there was to hug the Pacific through San Francisco, then turn east to New York, but he had a key stop to make: Hollywood. There, Garside thought, fame and riches awaited.

It wasn’t going to happen. In early 2000, Garside was in Venezuela, where he met and fell in love with another woman, Endrina Perez, who then accompanied him for much of the rest of his run (and whom he would later marry). But in May, soon after he left Caracas, the simmering conflict with Blaikie became personal. In his introduction to a reposted wire-service story, Blaikie, increasingly strident, wrote: “The accounts are awash in strong prose about the dangers he faces but not much about his actual running.” On May 15, Garside responded with a series of angry emails. Calling Blaikie a “mummies’ boy,” the Briton wrote: “Running is supposed to be a positive thing BUT the only criticism I have EVER had in the past five years is from YOU.” Blaikie’s reaction was to finally pronounce Garside an outright fraud: “I can’t accept his claims,” the Canadian retorted. “There is too much…to swallow at face value. And a thorough review of the diaries and press releases…only drives the point home.”

Blaikie’s tactics moved from written skepticism to near provocation; he began posting letters from his readers who sought “The Runningman” out to test him on the road. A typical challenge came from a Louisiana attorney who offered to pay Garside to compete in the Ultracentric 48-Hour Track Run, scheduled for November of that year in Dallas. The wording of the invitation, published on Blaikie’s website, showed how ugly the dispute had become: “Should be a piece of cake considering your accomplishments to date,” the lawyer wrote. “I’ll have to warn you, though, no ‘mummies’ boys.’ …only the laps you run, walk, or crawl will be counted.” Garside ignored the solicitation.

On September 1, 2000, Robert Garside crossed from Mexico into Southern California. TV crews recorded the event. Wearing a sombrero, the runner talked excitedly about his adventure, his plans. He had no idea that everything was about to come apart.

CROSSING THE BORDER Garside holds onto his sombrero as he starts his run across the United States, with Francisco Villalba at his side after Garside crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.

Photo by AP Photo/Denis Poroy

I MET GARSIDE BY ACCIDENT. I’d been assigned to write a story about another long-distance daredevil—a 19-year-old from Truckee, California, who was attempting to become the first person to skateboard across the U.S. The skater had briefly traveled with Garside. A person trying to run around the world would make for a good magazine article, and when my preliminary research led me to Blaikie and Garside’s likely fraudulence, the piece I was contemplating became even juicier.

The evidence against Garside seemed clear. He’d refused all chances to prove himself. And if Blaikie’s reconstruction of Garside’s route was correct, then The Runningman would be the fastest ultrarunner ever, faster even than runners competing on closed courses. As shaped by Blaikie, Garside’s claims seemed beyond outlandish: the runner, clearly, was delusional.

Garside didn’t help himself. He was the running equivalent of an NBA trash-talker, answering bluster with bluster. (In September 2000, he told the Associated Press: “I started out with $30, and I’m going to end up with $30 million. I guarantee it.”)

In recounting all this, I made a classic journalistic mistake. David Blaikie seemed credible, so I didn’t question either his methods or motives. Blaikie—who’d described himself as a “former journalist” and who’d earlier in his career worked as a political reporter on Parliament Hill—built a perfect campaign against Garside. When the runner left a series of angry voicemails, Blaikie printed them verbatim. When somebody popped up to defend Garside, Blaikie’s online commentary was crafted respectfully, but was ultimately dismissive.

But even all that might not have been enough to condemn Robert Garside. Then, on February 11, 2001, a bombshell dropped. Garside—by then halfway across the United States—admitted in a story written by Nic Fleming and James McDonald, printed in London’s Sunday Express newspaper, that he’d falsified his 1997 diaries. It didn’t matter that the incident occurred as part of an abortive attempt. Here it was: Robert Garside was a liar, and because he was a liar, nothing he did afterward would have credibility. My story, published in the November/December 2001 issue of the now-defunct National Geographic Adventure, was headlined, simply: “The Running Scam.” By that time Garside says his sponsorships had dried up, and any company or media outlet that seemed to be contemplating an association got calls and emails from angry ultrarunners. Good Morning America canceled an announced appearance after receiving protests.

There’s a philosophical question here, and like most philosophical questions, there’s no clear answer: Does Robert Garside’s lie in 1997 disqualify him? In 2001, I thought so, and so did much of the running community. What I didn’t notice (but should have) was that the dynamic between Blaikie and Garside had become so poisonous that an alternate point of view—that Garside was flawed and maddening at times, but the real deal—never even came up, and that the attacks against him simply weren’t fair. Why not wait until he was finished, when he could submit his evidence? Why the attempts to destroy him? Garside was being prosecuted for not running around the world before he’d even run around the world. In March 2001, the runner, broken and almost broke, left the United States for South Africa. “I had to go on,” he later told me, “but I didn’t know how.”

I cashed my check and congratulated myself for playing a role in guarding the purity of the sport. (I even wrote a second piece, for a media business blog, describing how the runner had fooled the press; Blaikie reprinted it on his website.) But I’d failed to ask a basic question: If Garside was faking it, what had he been doing during all the time he’d spent? Nobody—not me, not the other reporters who called Garside a fraud—had an answer for that. And as I would learn, when I finally got the chance to see the evidence, he’d clearly been to all the places he claimed to have been—and he’d moved at a runner’s pace.

ROBERT GARSIDE ARRIVED IN SOUTH AFRICA IN SPRING 2001. He headed north, planning to skirt the shores of the Indian Ocean. His goal was to reach the Middle East. But the attacks of September 11, 2001, changed all that. Garside, still in South Africa, continued running into Mozambique, but when he got to the Malawi border, he says, he was denied entry.

The journey was at the breaking point. Around the world, national frontiers were closing. He wasn’t sure how—or if—he could cross the Middle East; he was exhausted and almost out of money. Garside had always planned to run the long way across every continent. But the Guinness guidelines didn’t require it. So Garside flew to Morocco. He crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and spent most of 2002 traversing Europe along the Mediterranean. He finished this leg in Antalya on the southern coast of Turkey in the fall of 2002.

Determined to make an African traverse, though one wasn’t required, Garside next flew to Cairo, Egypt. There were two false starts: first a run south along the Nile River, and a second after flying to Eritrea to run along its coast. Troubled by the dangers of crossing war-torn Sudan and frustrated at the prospect of having land gaps along his course, Garside decided to reprise his route that ended in 2001. He returned to the Mozambique-Malawi border and ran southeast to Beira, Mozambique, on the sea. He could draw a straight line, on his Africa map, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, by connecting the run from Cape Town.

This terrestrial hopscotching might strike some as not entirely legitimate; but other round-the-world efforts, including Kunst’s—the Guinness-certified walk that inspired Garside—skipped continents entirely. Garside did cross Africa by running from Cape Town, on the Atlantic, to Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean. He then flew to Mumbai and took a train to Kanyakumari, at the southern tip of India, in early April 2003. He ran north; in two months, he covered approximately 1,500 miles. He arrived at New Delhi—his revised starting point—on June 13, 2003. The finish was covered by the British press, but there was hardly a single account that didn’t list the runner’s effort as, at the very least, tainted, if not entirely open to question.

ALMOST DONE Garside runs past a vegetable stall on a road through Kayamkulam, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, less than a month away from finishing his run around the world.

Photo by Dipak Kumar/Reuters

EVEN IN DISBELIEVING ROBERT GARSIDE, I thought he’d done something amazing. He’d claimed to have covered about 40,000 miles. What I marveled at was not Garside’s supposed achievement, but the extent—the commitment, the years—of his fabrication. If he was a fraud, he was the greatest fraud ever. I wondered if he might be ready to admit that. In Brazil, he let himself be photographed with Ronnie Biggs, who’d participated in the biggest train robbery in British history—1963’s “Great Train Robbery,” which netted the equivalent of almost $53 million current U.S. dollars. After being captured, Biggs escaped from jail and spent three decades living well and publicly in Brazil, becoming a popular anti-hero (he even contributed vocals to a Sex Pistols album). If he couldn’t convince people he’d run the globe, I thought, maybe Garside could find a side door into fame by detailing his eight-year fabrication.

In early 2004, I contacted Robert Garside. I told him I wanted to hear his story. He refused. I persisted. “I’m going to fly to London,” I told him. I named a meeting place. If the runner didn’t show up, I promised, I’d never bother him again. Two weeks later, at a Starbucks in the city’s Kensington district, Robert Garside appeared. He’d gained weight since the run had ended, and he looked nervous (I was, too). We talked for 10 cautious minutes, long enough to agree to meet the next day. It wasn’t really a shock, over the next week, to discover that I liked Robert Garside. (His ability to charm, his opponents said, was a talent he used to obscure his lies.) What surprised me was Garside’s openness. Everything I asked for, he delivered. I became the only person, up until that point, to gain full access to his logbooks, records, photographs, and travel documents.

For the first time, I understood the misery the assault against Garside had inflicted. His struggle had been blown to bits by what he saw as an angry mob. “Of course I’m crazy,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be crazy? After being harassed for years, I’m very crazy. As crazy as anyone else after being harassed, but I don’t have a clinical condition.”

The intensity of those attacks bordered on stalking, something I confirmed when I later contacted folks who really had accompanied Garside. David Walker, owner of a microbrewery near Santa Barbara, California, shadowed Garside as he ran the Pacific coast of the United States. Walker says he saw the runner cover 60 miles in a single day, whose primary highlights were the multiple ambushes he experienced along the way. “At one point,” Walker told me, “somebody literally jumped from the bushes. He said he was a 2:30 marathoner, and kept pushing Robert to run faster and faster. Finally, Robert just sat down at the side of the road and ignored him. He just refused to say anything or even move for 15 minutes.”

But I also understood the romance, the magic, that Garside must have experienced. In our conversations, Garside would sometimes trail into a stream of consciousness: “Midnight in Tibet, 4,700 meters at a peak,” he mused over a beer, “the top of this mountain, with the moon shining in your eyes. It’s a real journey.” Then, snapping back to reality, he concluded: “Normal life? I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” (He was also funny. When I asked him about why he decided to visit Ronnie Biggs, he laughed: “[Because] he’s on the run and so am I!”)

On the last day of my visit, Garside allowed me to borrow his evidence—an entire suitcase’s worth—and make copies. As I stood in a FedEx Kinko’s not far from Piccadilly Circus, the runner’s 1996 start point, the first hints of what would bring me to the Nullarbor appeared. Maybe Robert Garside did run around the world. And if he did, I screwed him. I screwed one of the greatest runners ever.

FOR THE NEXT YEAR, I STAYED IN CONSTANT CONTACT with Garside. I’d persuaded this magazine to assign me a story tentatively titled “The Confessions of Robert Garside.” As my deadline approached and passed, I still hadn’t told my editors that what I was really doing was not detailing the lies of a fraud, but proving that Garside truly did circle the world.

I’d reconstructed Garside’s run and found that Blaikie’s extrapolations didn’t add up. His basic technique was to combine various scraps of time-based evidence—news accounts, direct diary entries by Garside, and the file modification dates in the code underlying Garside’s website—to reconstruct the runner’s route using a global atlas. I didn’t necessarily see Blaikie’s methodology as illegitimate, but it was by no means authoritative. I had the real data: Garside’s passport stamps and logbooks. I made over 100 overseas phone calls. Many witnesses didn’t remember Garside, but of those who did, none said he was anything but a dedicated runner. Walker, the brewery owner, ran alongside Garside for 20 miles, then followed him in a car for another 40. The runner’s average pace, Walker says, was 8.5 minutes per mile. The next day, Walker told me, Garside ran 30 miles over the steep San Marcos Pass, just north of Santa Barbara, at a similar pace. “He was the real deal,” Walker says. “I can’t be any more positive. He just ticks differently than other people.”

I was able to confirm that Garside ran in places arguably more inhospitable than the Nullarbor. I found witnesses who saw him run up the Atlantic coast of Argentina and into Brazil; who saw him in Tingri, a Tibetan town that’s often used as a staging point for Everest attempts. Garside claimed to have been arrested in China. I had copies of the police paperwork, and a friend translated them. The runner’s story panned out.

Blaikie also had challenged Garside’s background, noting repeatedly that there was no evidence Garside had ever completed a public run of any distance. His refusal to submit credentials was further evidence of deception. But Garside saw it differently: “How could I? He was there on his sofa at home. I was in the middle of nowhere.” I was able to quickly confirm three Garside marathons in 1994. And he’d done well. In April, he finished the London Marathon in 3:01. On September 18, he placed 41st in the Brussels Marathon, pulling a 2:48. Less than 10 days later, on September 25, he clocked 3:10 in Amsterdam.

When I asked Garside why he didn’t respond to the attacks by taking the high road, accepting even one challenge to prove himself, he told me that the level of vitriol had convinced him that anything he did would end up being used against him. This had turned out to be true. About two weeks after his return to London, Garside was dared by the host of a British television show to run 130 miles in 24 hours. The run took place on the 400-meter track at London’s Kingsmeadow Athletics Centre. After 14 hours and 72 miles, Garside quit. In an article published on Blaikie’s site, Ian Champion—a British race organizer—wrote: “If Robert Garside was no better organized during his alleged road running through isolated, barren countries than he was during his…24-hour run, then I cannot believe he has run around the world.”

But Garside says that the assumption that running on the track is the same as running cross-country is mistaken. “I’d never run in circles like that,” Garside says. “The whole situation was demoralizing and humiliating.” And nobody, he complained, gave him credit for the 72 miles he did complete. When I asked Champion about that later, he softened his opinion: “I think if he trained for it,” Champion told me, “Garside could be a good runner.” Was it possible that Garside’s “failure,” with his mind and body in a state of collapse and exhaustion, in a milieu unlike any he’d ever faced, was situational? “Yes,” Champion admitted.

WHEN I MET WITH HIM IN LONDON, GARSIDE TOLD ME he was afraid to submit his materials to The Guinness Book of Records. A British ultrarunning statistician named Andy Milroy had founded an organization called The Association of Road Race Statisticians. (Blaikie provided Canadian statistics to the organization.) Milroy was on Guinness’s advisory committee for ultrarunning records, and already he and Blaikie had shown how powerful their influence over the records organization was. About a decade earlier, they’d brought into question an 11,134-mile run around the perimeter of the United States by a North Carolina woman named Sarah Fulcher. A Guinness editor told me that after Milroy’s inquiries, which were based on an article by Blaikie, the record had been “rested,” a sort of Guinness-speak version of shunning: A rested mark still stands officially, but it is not promoted or published.

When I read a story Blaikie wrote about Fulcher, I was struck by the way he compiled personal information about her, citing observers who noted her social behavior—Fulcher liked to party, the story implied—and questioning whether such behavior made her a fit runner. Blaikie had done the same thing with Robert Garside. As Garside ran across Australia, he was joined by McKinnon, the medical student who provided an eyewitness account of the runner’s final weeks in her country; she rode alongside him on a bicycle for 870 kilometers. On his website, Blaikie detailed Garside’s involvement with McKinnon, seeming to disapprove of the extra few weeks the runner spent in the company of a woman. “Most likely he simply wanted to enjoy himself,” Blaikie wrote, “which it seems he did, because it was at about this time that he met and became involved with Lucy.” In an emailed response that Blaikie also posted online, McKinnon—who has become a minor adventure celebrity in her own right; she’s the on-set doctor for the television show Survivor—angrily vouched for her former boyfriend: “You will be hard-pressed to prove that Robert is anything but a motivated, hard-working, driven, and honest man. I have no doubts in my mind that he will [do what he claims to be doing] despite what appears to be a…jealous bunch of people who call themselves ultramarathon runners.”

The “right” kind of ultrarunner, Blaikie told me, was someone like Al Howie, who ran across Canada in 1991 over 72 days; according to Blaikie, Howie’s run was meticulously organized, with a support vehicle, constant medical attention, and a strict regimen of massage, nutrition, and fluid replenishment. But Fulcher—whom I reached in North Carolina, where she now works at an animal shelter—says she represented a different kind of long-distance runner: one who does it out of the tradition of adventure rather than competitive athletics. “The real test is personality and character,” Fulcher says. “That’s what drives you to do something special. What David Blaikie will never understand is that talent is important, but the answer to everything is the journey itself.” After her record was rested by Guinness, Fulcher says, she became withdrawn, finding it difficult to cope with the destruction of her own life’s work. “I was in tears,” Fulcher says. “This man went after somebody he’d never met, never looked in my eyes.” Fulcher recovered, joining the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, doing 42 combat parachute jumps; she resumed her running career and did 10-milers and triathlons for the Army. She remains, however, a nonpublished entity at Guinness.

I believe that David Blaikie thought Robert Garside was a fraud, and I believe Blaikie was defending a sport he loved. I also believe that Blaikie’s expectations of ultrarunners—as much as anything Robert Garside did or said—influenced his condemnation of the Briton’s entire effort, and that the acrimony between the two men so heated the atmosphere that what might have been a simple dispute turned into a protracted feud. I put this hypothesis directly to Blaikie, and he denied it; he said that his work was fair and objective, and that he was simply raising questions about Robert Garside.

I wrote my story for Runner’s World vindicating him.

But it never got published. Reading back on it, I can see that I had gotten it right—but the piece was a mess. I sounded like a conspiracy theorist. When my editors asked me to rewrite it, I saw the request as an effort to soften my assertions (this wasn’t the case; I’d lost perspective). I refused. Only by telling the story my way—written from inside a rabbit hole—could I redeem Robert Garside.

And so, I couldn’t redeem Garside at all.

I’d failed him—I’d screwed him—again.

I LOST TOUCH WITH ROBERT GARSIDE AFTER THAT. The runner eventually did submit his records to Guinness, and—like me, and like anyone who’d actually seen the documentation—the book’s editors concluded that the run was genuine. “I have approved many records, and this record had an astronomical amount of evidence, and it could be cross-checked, so we are happy and satisfied,” Marco Frigatti, Guinness’s then head of records, told The Telegraph in 2007.

But when I received my copy of that year’s record book, there was no sign of Garside. Nor was there in 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2011. The organization’s database, which contains more than 40,000 records, returns a null result when the name “Garside” is searched for. I couldn’t see this being a mere oversight: Circumnavigation—if you judge by the prominence the organization gives such efforts in its annual editions—is a very popular Guinness record category.

Had Garside’s record, like Fulcher’s, been blotted out by being “rested”? My contact at Guinness had moved on, and the organization’s new policy, I was told, was not to comment on such things. But I kept at it, and in late 2010—perhaps I’d worn them down—Guinness spokesperson Sara Wilcox confirmed that Garside, despite the recognition, hadn’t ever and would likely never appear in any Guinness publication, or even on the organization’s massive web database. “This record is rested,” Wilcox wrote me in an email. “When Robert Garside completed the run, Guinness World Records carefully checked all documentation and evidence, and there was nothing to suggest the record wasn’t true; however, with these records it is almost impossible to be absolutely sure, and so the category was rested.”

I felt indignant. The Guinness Book contains other records that can’t be absolutely verified—claims of longevity, for example, are notoriously porous. Though the organization wouldn’t confirm whether anyone had lobbied for the retirement of the Garside category, I wondered if the runner’s opponents had triumphed again. And I wondered how Robert Garside felt. I tried to contact him, but he’d vanished—emails to the addresses I had bounced back to me. Phone numbers were disconnected.

Garside had met with another betrayal, this time not by me, but I was the one who was going to do something about it. David Blaikie asserted that running the Nullarbor alone was virtually impossible.

So that’s where I decided to go.

Morgan Beeby

NULLARBOR The author ran across the abysmally hot Nullarbor Plain in western Australia to see if it was possible. More photos of his trek can be found here.

Morgan Beeby

MY STRATEGY FOR THE NULLARBOR WAS BASED ON AN EMAIL I’d gotten from Garside years earlier. In it, he wrote: “I was able to play the passing traffic to my advantage. If I needed water, it was there. If I needed to stop, I could choose a road sign and log off there, and then go to another place to sleep. In this way, it wasn’t hard at all. No tougher than anywhere else.”

So there it was: Garside sometimes commuted between start and stop points by hitchhiking. At first, this disconcerted me—but it made sense; without doing so, the runner would have had to simply collapse at his end point every day, curl up in a ball, and sleep there.

Garside’s documentation and photo diary suggest that even when this primary tactic failed, the relative frequency of traffic on the Nullarbor made the logistics of the run less pressing. Beeby and I learned that on our fourth day, after we arrived at the Nundroo Roadhouse. The longest “uninhabited” stretch of our journey—nearly 90 miles—was to follow. Earlier, we’d persuaded a couple in a caravan to forward-drop our supplies at 10-mile intervals up the road. We reached our first cache as evening fell. Beeby found a sheltered spot off the road; we pitched our tents and pried open the cans of beans and tuna the travelers stowed for us.

It wasn’t a calm night. Venomous snakes are common to the region, and it isn’t unknown to find one, in the morning, warming itself inside your shoe or underneath the floor of your tent. An unexpected and brief thunderstorm had turned the red dirt of our campsite to sticky clay, and we emerged from the brush filmy and soaked.

The next morning’s pace was good. Beeby took a lead, and I told him to keep going; we’d meet at the next food drop. Soon I could barely see him against the horizon. After 10 brisk miles, though, his figure loomed larger. He was stopped, standing by the side of the road. Cache Number Two had been destroyed. The gallon-sized water jugs were empty. Even the cans of food were scattered; our gear bags were torn open. Wild dogs, most likely, we speculated.

Beeby and I quickly calculated our reserves. Beeby is a scientist—he spends all day looking into an electron microscope—and one of the reasons I asked him to come along is that I trust his rational and sober judgment. “We’ve got enough,” he said. “Even if we’re all alone for the next 20 miles.”

But we weren’t alone, and couldn’t be. Bob Bongiorno, manager of the Balladonia Roadhouse, told me that he remembered Garside. “We looked after him for a couple of days,” he said. “And we saw him run. We took him to his start point each day for a few days, then picked him up, and gave him a bed to sleep in.” We were cradled in that typical Australian friendliness an hour later, when a car stopped in front of us. “I heard about you,” the driver said, presenting us with two bottles of fresh orange juice—the best I’ve ever tasted—and an unopened can of insect repellent. Robert Garside’s diary contained a similar account, and in person, he told me, “The key to running the Nullarbor turned out to be Australian hospitality.”

MY BODY WAS BREAKING DOWN. BLISTERS HAD ERUPTED along my heels and toes. My right pinky toe had split open, becoming infected, soaking my sock with blood. The ball of my left foot had also become swollen with fluid, feeling as if it was trying to burst out of my shoe. And an ominous blood clot seemed to be spreading beneath my heel, creating a stain that expanded with every step. I wanted to stop. What was I trying to prove? Let it go, I said to myself, and you can go home right now.

Beeby made me continue. It wasn’t about proving something; it wasn’t about Robert Garside. It was about, simply, choosing to run. No buses or trains are accessible from the Eyre Highway. The nearest rail line is more than 60 miles of untracked desert to the north. We’d arranged for a ride to Perth, but our pickup point was days—and miles—away. Unless we wanted to quit entirely and resort to hitching, there was nothing left to do but run, to move—slowly, if I had to, but keep moving—along the longest straight road on the planet, into a sun that seemed never to budge at all, at least until the very end of the day, when, in a heartbeat, it plunged below the horizon.

It was in that perfectly still sun, somehow, that I found my own stillness. It came after we passed the Yalata Roadhouse—abandoned at the time of my visit, but thriving when Garside visited. I’d felt a disheartening rush as we approached the ruined outpost; I’d hoped for cold drinks, but as we passed, I simply gazed forward and kept moving. What sensations I felt, over the next three days, were fleeting, almost tidal: the whoosh of a truck; the rhythm of my feet on gravel. I’d come out of my haze and realize, for a moment, that I’d been counting my footfalls, and that I’d been whispering the numbers, then fall back under the spell.

We were close to the sea now. Milky-white dunes rose at the road’s southern edge. We detoured away from the highway to peer at the cliffs that tower above the Southern Ocean. I was told that a century ago, explorers attempting to cross the expanse watched helplessly—and sometimes starved or died of thirst—as vessels below signaled but were unable to effect a rescue. The palisades of the Nullarbor remain unclimbable to this day.

But the plain itself can be run. We returned to the road and decided we’d done enough for the day. We thumbed forward to the Nullarbor Roadhouse, which sits at the tail end of the plain’s most barren, overheated section. At the roadhouse dorm, Beeby filled a plastic bin with ice and ordered me to plunge my feet in.

I kept them submerged as long as I could, pulled them out, waited, and did it again, and again. Finally, I wrapped everything in a towel and slept. The next morning, we woke up early. Word had spread, and at breakfast, our waiter hurried us along: “The fresh air is beautiful today,” he boomed. “Boys, go stretch your legs!”

And we did. We got a ride back to the mile marker we’d finished at the day before, and began our final stretch: 15 miles by my GPS log, which we covered in just over four hours. It wasn’t pretty, but it was fast enough, especially the last kilometer. One mile beyond the roadhouse is the sign marking the terminus of the Nullarbor’s most intense segment, and the end of our journey: NULLARBOR PLAIN: WESTERN END OF TREELESS PLAIN.

We reached it in a sprint.

FOOT PAIN “Around the sixth day, this weird blood clot began to spread underneath the skin of the sole of my foot. By the end of the trip, it would be three times as large. Six months after I returned home, it finally vanished. What was it? I didn’t want to know.”

Graeme Murray

MORE THAN A YEAR LATER, MY FEET REMAIN INJURED. The blisters reappear whenever I run more than five miles. My gait has changed, probably because of the damage. I ignore it. I run.

Two questions remain.

The first is whether I vindicated Robert Garside. As I recovered, I tried again to reach him; I found a mailing address, but got no response. Then, just as this story was going to press, I got a one-line email: “Are you trying to reach me?” That resulted in a series of strained and off-the-record exchanges; even if I could publish them, there was little information revealed. (Garside did agree to be photographed for this story, however, and provided pictures from his run.)

I wondered if others had softened their opinions. After several attempts, I finally managed to reach David Blaikie on the phone. “My views on Robert Garside have not changed, but it is not a subject I want to go back and revisit,” he told me. “What I reported at the time remains on the record and speaks for itself. I have no comment on Guinness’s decision to recognize Garside. I leave it to the running community to draw its own conclusions on the issue.”

The battle over Garside went on in the pages of Wikipedia for years. Garside’s opponents went through an angry back-and-forth over the content of the page; it became so ugly that the online encyclopedia’s administrators have now blocked the entry from external edits.

I did make one truly new discovery, and it struck at the heart of the “smoking gun” that had inflicted the most damage. It turned out that the Sunday Express newspaper story—the one where Garside had first admitted his fabrications—had its own flaw: Fleming’s coauthor, “James McDonald,” appeared to be a pseudonym. In my earlier research, Fleming told me he’d coaxed Garside into confessing, promising a story that would vindicate him. “I stitched him up,” the reporter said. “I felt bad about it, but I thought I had to.” But I’d never bothered to ask about the other name attached to the scoop, and when I tried to contact McDonald, I couldn’t: No reporter by that name had appeared in the paper before or since. Fleming, when asked about McDonald, said, “He was a freelance journalist. That wasn’t his real name. He had reasons he didn’t want his real name used.” Whether or not Garside was guilty, the fact that one important accuser wasn’t who he said he was made the story’s hold on the moral high ground tenuous, at best.

I did manage to reach Garside’s former manager, Mike Soulsby, who earlier had vouched for the runner, but then said he found himself starting to believe the flood of “evidence” against his infamous client. But time had given Soulsby more objective distance from the issue, and he supplied what may be the definitive statement on Garside, absent one from Garside himself: “I think Robert was sometimes his own worst enemy. He would boast about achievements, but couldn’t back them up. I think he was talking himself up as a way to motivate himself, and sometimes it went too far.”

And the run itself? “The answer is yes,” Soulsby told me.

“Yes,” I asked, “meaning Robert Garside ran around the world?” Soulsby then told me—just so I knew—that he had no financial stake in Garside, and that in fact, the runner still owed him money. “I was pissed off at him,” Soulsby says. But that didn’t make a difference, Soulsby continued: “Robert Garside ran around the world. He did it. And that’s amazing.”

For nearly a decade now, two cartons of Garside-related material have sat in my office, right next to my desk. During that time, I’ve moved, married, and become a father. All that time and obsession, the damage to my mind and body, makes me ask the second question: Was it worth it? The answer to that is easier: It doesn’t matter. I had no choice.

I’ve given myself permission to throw everything onto the fire—a hellacious, raging bonfire. It isn’t that I wouldn’t mind really talking to Garside. I gather, from our brief exchange, that he’s happy. And I hope, and I guess, that when he reads this, he’ll see that I was, perhaps, even crazier than him.

After all, my obsession with Robert Garside has lasted longer than his entire run around the world. That’s long enough.

Story Update · November 17, 2016

Robert Garside did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this update. But according to writer Dan Koeppel, this story set the record straight on Garside’s run. “It was the most authoritative fact-checking process I’ve ever been through,” he says. “I have no doubt that Robert Garside ran around the world, and I have no doubt that many more people believe that, and understand what acted against him was a combination of his own personality and the cultural conflicts we outlined, not actual fraud.” In fact, Garside’s Wikipedia entry—once locked due to feuding among anonymous editors—has been updated to reflect Koeppel’s meticulous analysis of the run. Runners continue to chase circumnavigation records, even though Guinness no longer reviews them: In 2013, Australian Tom Denniss completed a 16,300-mile run through 18 countries in a record 622 days, a mark ratified by the World Runners Association. (RW reported on Denniss’s feat in the multimedia feature, “40 Million Steps Around the World.”) In 2015, England’s Kevin Carr broke that record by less than a day. Koeppel’s own running has been limited by chronic foot pain that he says stems from his run across the Nullarbor Plain. “That was the peak of my life as a runner, and it was probably an ill-advised thing to do,” he says. “That’s the difference between me and Robert Garside: He was a really good runner.” –Nick Weldon

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